Personal watercraft (PWC) have become increasingly popular in recent years. A personal watercraft, also known as a “jet ski” typically has a bottom hull, handle bars for steering, a tunnel within the bottom hull, a jet pump located within the bottom tunnel, and an engine within the hull under the top deck for driving the jet pump. The jet pump typically pulls in water from the front of the tunnel under the boat, and discharges the water at high velocity through a steerable nozzle at the rear of the boat. The handlebars are typically coupled to the nozzle, which is the steering mechanism for the personal watercraft. The watercraft commonly has a straddle-type seat and foot wells disposed on either side of the seat.
Personal watercraft typically have a top deck affixed to a bottom hull. The PWC has a shroud mounted in front of the driver on top of the top deck to house the steering column and some instruments. A front portion of the top deck includes a hinged cover or “hood.” The underside of the hood can include a gasket or a grommet that attempts to provide a watertight seal between the hood and the top deck. The hood typically covers either a storage bin or an engine access port.
In previous PWCs, instruments such as speedometers have been mounted in or on the shroud part of the deck, often behind a small windshield that is in front of the driver. The wires for such instruments typically originate from components located within and under the top deck. The wires then extend through the deck to instrument readout devices such as speedometers located on the opposite, top side of the top deck.
Previously, wires that run through the deck have been run through a rubber liner or tube surrounded by an annular grommet. The wires run through the grommet surfaced upwardly within an instrument gauge compartment, which was itself, often watertight. In some PWCs, the instrument was formed integrally with a part of the top deck. In these PWCs, the point of wire passage through the top deck was not a likely source of water entry because the passageway through the deck was not exposed to water.
PWC manufacturers have recently tried to expand the storage bin size under the hood. Hood sizes have therefore increased. This, in turn, has shrunk the shroud area, reducing the space available for instrument placement. For this reason, instrument readout devices are currently being placed on top of the hood, instead of on the shroud.
The hood is hingedly mounted to the personal watercraft top deck at the front, rather than at the rear, as in an automobile. The instrument readout device may be mounted beneath a small windshield on the rear-most portion of the hood, in front of the driver, and well behind the point of hinged mounting. The wires must thus originate from within the top deck and terminate on the outside of the top deck near the rear portion of the upwardly swingable hood at the instrument readout location.
Watercraft manufacturers have passed the wires for the instrument panel and other wires through the top deck, and have made some attempts to provide a watertight passage through the point of wire entry through the top deck. One, typical approach includes the use of a corrugated, rubber or plastic tube. The wires often have hard plastic, rigid plugs or connectors at both ends for connecting to other electrical connectors beneath the top deck and in the instrument panel. These electrical connectors may, for example, have four or more discrete contacts within the rigid electrical plug. During manufacture, a top deck is provided, having a hole for passing the wireway through the top deck. A corrugated, rubber or plastic tube can also be provided, having a slit along its length. The wire bundle can be forced transversely from the outside of the tube, through the slit, sideways into the tube center. This can avoid the problem of trying to drag the large electrical plugs through the narrower tube. A rubber boot or grommet can then be stretched to fit over the electrical plug at one end, and slid over the corrugated tube to form a wire bundle assembly.
This assembly can then be inserted through the hole in the top deck, with the boot or grommet resiliently deformed to sit astride the top deck layer, typically having a flange on both the top side of the top deck and the underside of the top deck. The wires or multiwire bundles typically have a round shape, there being multiple round shapes extending through a larger, nominally round, slit, corrugated tube. This geometry lends itself toward water leakage as two, or three round shapes disposed within a larger round shape leave a void area. To address this leakage problem, zip ties are often put around the outer corrugated tube above and below the rubber grommet and tightened, in an attempt to make the wire passage through the grommet watertight.
This approach has proved less than satisfactory. The lengthwise slit through the tube provides a point of entry for water into the top portion of the tube, above the zip tie. The zip tie itself often does not provide a watertight seal between the outer corrugated tube and the inner wire or wire bundles. There is often some space between the outer rubber grommet and the corrugated rubber tube. The end of the corrugated rubber tube is typically open. As this provides another point of entry for water, some manufacturers have attempted to plug the upper end of the corrugated tube with a specially designed plug in an attempt to plug the corrugated tube while providing specially shaped apertures for passing the wires or wire bundles through the plug. This plug can become dislodged, or not replaced after being taken out, and in any case, does not prevent water entry along the length of the slit.
The position of the wireway passage through the top deck also presents a problem. The opening and closing of the hood, with the wires typically being run, at some point, under the hood, requires that there be a sufficient amount of slack in the wires to allow for opening the hood. The added length of wire or wire tubing can be undressed wire, which can present a length of wire or tubing that can become snagged, cracked, and otherwise fatigued.
What would be desirable is a system for providing a watertight seal for running wires through the top deck of a personal watercraft. What would be advantageous is an easier to manufacture wireway for extending through the top deck of a personal watercraft. A wireway seal that was actually watertight and that did not require the current length of slack in order to allow for hood opening would be most advantageous. Easier to manufacture systems for installing wireways through personal watercraft top decks would also be advantageous.